NICE readies for maiden HTA meet on Parkinson’s monitoring tech

Five wearable technologies designed to continuously and remotely monitor people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) are up for evaluation at the end of August by the UK National Institute of Clinical Excellence. 

The August 31 meeting of the NICE special committee is the first step towards establishing guidelines for - and ultimately driving clinical uptake of - these technologies, which include: the Personal KinetiGraph (PKG) movement recording system from Global Kinetics; the Kinesia 360 and KinesiaU from Great Lakes Neurotechnologies; the PDMonitor from PD Neurotechnology; and STAT-ON from Sense4Care. KinesiaU is pending CE marking, while the remaining four are already CE-marked. 

Expanding patient review options

The assessment will evaluate whether such remote continuous monitoring devices are effective and reliable for monitoring motor symptoms, tremors and sleep disturbance that could indicate if the patient is deteriorating or not. Assessing movement at night may also help identify sleep related issues such as interrupted sleep which could be caused by symptoms returning when medications wear off or nocturia.

The data collected could potentially be used by clinicians to manage symptoms during, in between, and sometimes in place of,  in-office review appointments, according to NICE. 

These five technologies generally comprise a wearable (though the number of devices and place where they are won would vary from one system to another) and associated software and management app. Only products capable of generating results with no input, or limited input, from the user have been included in this assessment.  

January target

This would be the first guidance from NICE focused on digital monitoring technologies for PD. Previous guidance documents related to this condition have largely focused on drug treatments. A second committee meeting for this PD remote monitoring HTA is set for the end of October, following a consultation period, and NICE aims to publish the guidelines on January 25 next year.